Blanchot and Freud: The Step/Not beyond the Pleasure PrincipleAuthor(s): Alan BourassaReviewed work(s):Source: SubStance, Vol. 24, No. 3, Issue 78 (1995), pp. 105-120Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685010 .Accessed: 08/01/2012 23:29

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Blanchot and Freud: The Step/Not Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Alan Bourassa

But dying, no more than it cannot finish or accomplish itself, even in death, does not let itself be situated or affirmed in a relation of life, even as a declining relation, a declining of life... And life knows nothing of dying, says nothing about it, without, however, confining itself to silence; there is, suddenly and always, a murmur among words, the rumor of absence that passes in and to the outside of discourse...

-Blanchot, Le Pas au-dela (The Step Not Beyond [93])

Freud's "Death Drive": An Impossible Project

DOES FREUD EVER SPEAK OF DEATH? Does he ever make death present

through speaking? Does he realize death as possibility in trying to make it the object of a scientific-albeit speculative-discourse? In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Civilization and its Discontents, and The Ego and the Id, Freud traces out his elusive theory of the death drive, undaunted by the impossibility of his project, and finds, at the end, a still unresolved disjunc- tion between life and death, Eros and Thanatos. Libido seems to be everywhere. It is what acts, what speaks, what conjoins-pure affirmation, an affirmation so relentless that, like the pleasure principle, it seems to allow nothing to escape its power. It is that in relation to which death can

only seem a silence, a passivity, an inertia, but still a silence that stifles, an inertia that anchors, a passivity that resists energy. Death must act in Freud. It does not escape libidinal investment, is not seen except in con- junction with Eros. For this reason, as we shall see, the death drive is regarded, if not as one of the workings of the pleasure principle, then at least as a form of affirmation. But what other choice is there, if one is not to become entangled in impossibility and paradox? Freud's attempts to dis- tinguish a death drive that works against the force of libido leads him into just such entanglements. Yet, it is also impossible to say that the question of the death drive is badly posed, and does not really serve to explain

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anything. The death drive cannot be dismissed, because even if it does not

exist, it insists, and its insistence will not be denied. For Maurice Blanchot, the insistence of dying, its impossibility, its

incompleteness, is the starting point of any speech that tries to speak of

dying. Between speaking and dying there is, at once, an unbridgeable gap and yet a resonance, an absence rendered all the more intimate by proximity. Through Blanchot, we see that what is for Freud beyond the

pleasure principle is not death, but dying. There is dying beyond the

pleasure principle. There is nothing beyond the pleasure principle. These statements do not contradict each other, but neither are they identical. The "there is" is what renders the question of the pleasure principle impossible. As Blanchot observes in The Writing of the Disaster:

Between the two falsely interrogative propositions-why is there some- thing rather than nothing? and, why is there evil rather than good?-I do not recognize the difference which is supposed to be discernible, for both are sustained by a "there is" [un "il y a"] which is neither being nor nothing- ness, neither good nor evil, and without which the whole discussion collap- ses, or on account of which it has already collapsed. (65)

Does this movement of the neutral correspond to the non-moving move- ment of the death drive? Certainly this does not describe Freud's own view, but, rather, a paradox implicit in the concept of "the death drive."

According to Deleuze and Guattari, it is Freud who makes the death drive a principle of transcendence, a kind of pure silence: non-action, non-desire. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, make death a principle of con- struction, of affirmation, a kind of zero state that each system or "desiring- machine" carries within itself:

We say ... that there is no death instinct because there is both the model and the experience of death in the unconscious. Death then is a part of the desiring-machine, a part that must itself be judged, evaluated in the functioning of the desiring machine and the system of its energetic conver- sions, and not as an abstract principle. (332)

For Deleuze and Guattari, nothing is more affirmative than death. Rather than nothingness or unspeakable emptiness, death is modelled on "the Body without organs" ("The body without organs is the model of death" [329]), a state of pure virtuality from which all possibilities can be actualized. Death is as much desire as is life:

Death is not desired, there is only death that desires, by virtue of the body without organs or the immobile motor, and there is also life that desires, by virtue of the working organs. There we do not have two desires, but two

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parts, two kinds of desiring-machine parts, in the dispersion of the machine itself. (329)

This definition of the death drive corresponds more to Freud's pre- 1920 definition, in which the libidinal sexual instincts were opposed to the

self-preservative, aggressive ego instincts invested by the death drive. Freud was forced, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, to define this difference as merely topological (63). Deleuze and Guattari, in defining the death drive as a part of the same desiring-machine that includes life-desires, make the same topological distinction as Freud. The dovetailing of libido and ego instincts leads Freud to a more difficult, even impossible, question. Libidinal instincts-which now include both sexual and ego instincts-are

opposed by the death drive which must be, in some way, non-libidinal. But death is so easily, so inevitably, defined in terms of life, that it is difficult to

imagine speaking of death. Freud faces this problem when trying to find some way of indicating,

if only indirectly, the workings of the death drive. The paradoxical nature of the very term "death drive," not lost on Jacques Lacan (101), forces Freud into defining the death drive, now as pure silence, working by a kind of inorganic passivity ("... we shall be compelled to say that 'the aim

of all life is death' and, looking backwards, that inanimate things existed before living ones" [Beyond 46]), and now as an active force only stifled by a

stronger sexual drive which, once exhausted through satisfaction, fails to control the upsurge of death as an agent:

... death coincides with the act of copulation in some of the lower animals. These creatures die in the act of reproduction because, after Eros has been eliminated through the process of satisfaction, the death instinct has a free hand for accomplishing its purposes. (Ego and Id 46-47)

Indeed, the fusion of the mute death drive with the "clamor" of the libidinal drive becomes a strategy that allows Freud to bring the death drive, however problematically, into the realm of speaking. Once this death drive is made an object of thought it becomes, for Freud, not so much a principle as a category for explaining a number of phenomena that seem to point to a force "beyond the pleasure principle." For Freud, death is no

longer simply that which opposes life or tries to return life to its origins in

inorganic matter. The death drive becomes an explanation for those errant

processes that seem to fit neither into the unconscious nor into the con-

scious-preconscious (Stoodley 184-185). These errant processes are, as

Laplanche points out, hardly compatible with each other, and include "the

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reduction of tension to zero (Nirvana), the tendency towards death, self-ag- gressiveness, the search for suffering or unpleasure" (108).

Laplanche goes on to demonstrate how one of the cornerstones of Freud's death drive theory, the "Nirvana principle," is compatible with a

heightening of tension and excitement rather than an ineluctable diminish- ment. Freud says:

The dominating tendency of mental life, and perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli (the "Nirvana principle" . . .)-a tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principle; and our recognition of that fact is one of our strongest reasons for believing in the existence of death instincts. (Beyond 67)

Laplanche, however, reminds us that a principle of constancy and a zero principle are not necessarily compatible. If an organic system has as its

goal the maintenance of a certain energy level N, then the system will either evacuate energy when the level of tension is too high or seek excita- tion when the energy level is too low. The goal of the system to maintain homeostasis does not then lead it to a total evacuation of energy (113-114). This tendency towards zero that characterizes the death drive would also seem incompatible with its other attributes-aggression both towards the self and towards the outside world, and the compulsion to repeat.

Though the idea of an organism whose main goal is to die seems rather un-Darwinian for a thinker trying to forge bonds with biology (Sul- loway 407), Freud attempted to explain aggressiveness with reference to the death drive, but only at the price of making aggressiveness for the

purpose of survival a secondary characteristic of the organism.

It appears that, as a result of the combination of unicellular organisms into multicellular forms of life, the death instinct of a single cell can successfully be neutralized and the destructive impulses be diverted on to the external world through the instrumentality of a special organ. This special organ would seem to be the muscular apparatus; and the death instinct would thus seem to express itself-though probably only in part -as an instinct of destruction directed against the external world and other organisms. (Ego and Id 38-39)

But surely not aggression for the sake of aggression. The aggression turned toward the world, whether in the form of hunting, eating, or self-defense, is more than the projection of an instinct to the outside in order to protect the organism. Certainly aggression towards the outer world-if only in the form of the placid bovine destruction of grass-is a primary characteristic of any living organism, and is far more compatible with the drive for

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survival than with the tendency toward death. These aggressive drives, it is to be remembered, are the same drives that Freud saw as the basis of ego production, an ego production that, after 1920, Freud called libidinal.

The death drive-in the form of aggressiveness-even when not

projected to the outside world, can be introjected and form a part of the severe superego (Civilization 78). Deleuze and Guattari complain that Freud "could no longer conceive the essence of life except in a form turned back against itself, in the form of death itself" (333). This turning of life

against itself that goes by the name of death also raises the question of sadism and masochism, which Freud sees as two phases of a single move- ment.

But how can the sadistic instinct, whose aim is to injure the object, be derived from Eros, the preserver of life? Is it not plausible to suppose that this sadism is in fact a death instinct which, under the influence of the narcissistic libido, has been forced away from the ego and has consequently only emerged in relation to the object? ... Masochism, the turning round of the instinct upon the subject's ego, would, in that case be a return to an earlier phase of the instinct's history, a regression. (Beyond 66)

Repetition: "An Awesome, Independent Force"

Leaving aside the question of pain, of how or why pain indicates the

working of the death drive (since pain is more accurately interpreted as a

part of the body's self-defensive feedback system), we can see in masochism the trace of an older and more relentless drive than either life or death-repetition. In Masochism, Deleuze subordinates pain to the work-

ings of repetition, saying, "This is the essential point: pain only acquires significance in relation to the forms of repetition which condition its use" (119). For Freud the pleasure principle is suspended by a force binding in- stinctual excitation:

... only after the binding has been accomplished would it be possible for the dominance of the pleasure principle (and of its modification, the reality principle) to proceed unhindered. Till then the other task of the mental apparatus, the task of mastering or binding excitations, would have precedence-not, indeed, in opposition to the pleasure principle, but inde- pendently of it and to some extent in disregard of it. (Beyond 41)

Only a highly cathected system has the energy to bind incoming excita- tions; a system can be hyper-cathected, that is, have more energy directed towards it in order to bind more powerful excitations. This speculation led Freud to assume the existence of a neutral desexualized energy that

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110AlnBuas

proceeds from a narcissistic appropriation of Eros and that operates both in the ego and the id (Ego and Id 42). He writes:

The transformation [of erotic libido] into ego-libido of course involves aban- donment of sexual aims, a desexualization... By thus getting hold of the libido from the object-cathexes, setting itself up as the sole love object, and desexualizing or sublimating the libido of the id, the ego is working in opposition to the purposes of Eros and placing itself at the service of the opposing instinctual impulses. (Ego and Id 44-45)

Here, Freud assumes a force counter to libido, the death drive, but places it in the service of a desexualized, neutral energy that is able to cathect both erotic and destructive impulses (42). Thus desexualization seems-like

repetition-to function as a force that precedes both the life and death instincts, or at least functions independently of them. On the other hand, it is also possible to see this force-because it proceeds from the ego's ap- propriation of the id's object-cathexis-as a force operating under the

governance of the pleasure principle. Repetition also has this problematic relationship to the pleasure principle.

Repetition is characterized by Deleuze as a binding power that

proceeds from Eros and holds both life and death under its sway. Al-

though Freud sees the compulsion to repeat as "more primitive, more

elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over- rides" (Beyond 25), he also sees binding as a force which acts "on behalf of the pleasure principle; the binding is a preparatory act which introduces and assures the dominance of the pleasure principle" (Beyond 75-76). Deleuze sees in repetition a twofold character. In one form it acts as a force that precedes even the death drive, that renders the death drive only a

secondary effect. He writes:

The "binding" action of Eros... may, and indeed must, be characterized as "repetition"-repetition in respect of excitation, and repetition of the mo- ment of life, and the necessary union... repetition is what holds together the instant; it constitutes simultaneity. But inseparable from this form of the repetition we must conceive of another which in its turn repeats what was before the instant-before excitation disturbed the indifference of the unex- citable and life stirred the inanimate from its sleep . . . Beyond Eros we encounter Thanatos; beyond the ground, the abyss of the groundless; beyond the repetition that links, the repetition that erases and destroys. (114)

Repetition here becomes "an awesome, independent force" (Deleuze 120) behind which life, death, and pleasure follow obediently. No longer in the service of mastery, repetition puts into question the efficacy of power and mastery themselves. One does not, in other words, repeat in order to

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master; rather, one is mastered by repetition, a repetition that refuses, in

spite of its primacy, to serve as a grounding for any principle: "No sooner have we reached the condition or ground of our principle than we are hurled headlong beyond to the absolutely unconditioned, the 'ground-less' from which the ground itself emerged" (Deleuze 114).

We find ourselves on the edge of an abyss, and before I allow Blanchot the final shove, I want to stop and reiterate what we have uncovered so far in the Freudian death drive. Freud has, in fact, discovered processes that are not directly under the sway of the pleasure principle. Binding, like

repetition and desexualization, seems to oppose the pleasure principle. But for Freud, binding is precisely what founds the pleasure principle. It is libidinal both in its energy source and its goals. Repetition occurs in the name of mastery and desexualization in the name of energy. Thus, if there is a beyond of the pleasure principle, there seems to be nothing beyond libido. When Laplanche concludes that ". .. the death drive does not

possess its own energy. Its energy is libido. Or, better put, the death drive is the very soul, the constitutive principle, of libidinal circulation" (124), he

acknowledges two irreconcilable aspects of the death drive. First, it does not displace libido. There is only libido, nothing else. What is done in the

unconscious, what is bound, discharged, sexualized, desexualized, is done with the energy of libido. Second, it somehow makes possible libidinal circulation. This recalls Deleuze and Guattari's body without organs, the "immobile motor," the zero state of pure virtuality from which an as-

semblage springs. The death drive functions not as a drive, but as a set of

intervals, differences, displacements.

Blanchot: Not Death, But Dying

In theoretical discourse, death is anything but inevitable; there is noth-

ing more elusive, nothing that evades experience more completely. Yet

nothing seems more important. Libido is marked by what refuses to exist,

speech is incited by what refuses to be spoken. The incompleteness of Freud's project to provide a scientific discourse on death-indeed the im-

possibility of the project from the outset-is the sign of the working of

something that I hesitate to name, but that Blanchot has struggled with

throughout his writings. The first interaction of Blanchot and Freud, one that seems vitally

necessary, is the rereading of the Freudian death drive through the Blanchotian distinction between death and dying.

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There is in death, it would seem, something stronger than death; it is dying itself-the intensity of dying, the push of the impossible, the pressure of the undesirable even in the most desired. Death is power and even strength- limited, therefore. It sets a final date, it adjourns in the sense that it assigns to a given day-both random and necessary-at the same time that it defers till an undesignated day. But dying is un-power. It wrests from the present, it is always a step over the edge, it rules out every conclusion and all ends, it does not free nor does it shelter. In death, one can find an illusory refuge: the grave is as far as gravity can pull, it marks the end of the fall; the mortuary is the loophole in the impasse. But dying flees and pulls in- definitely, impossibly and intensively in the flight. (Disaster 47-48)

The attraction, the "pull" that dying exercises on what exists is not the result of its offering a positive presence. Attraction, for Blanchot, is ground- less, not so much a force as a void. As Foucault writes:

To be attracted is not to be beckoned by the allure of the outside; rather, it is to experience in emptiness and destitution the presence of the outside and, tied to that presence, the fact that one is irremediably outside the outside... The outside cannot offer itself as a positive presence-as something inward- ly illuminated by the certainty of its own existence-but only as an absence that pulls as far away from itself as possible, receding into the sign it makes to draw one toward it (as though it were possible to reach it). (27-28)

An absence that is more attractive than any presence, a non-existence that cannot simply be ignored, a nothingness that nonetheless imposes a kind of demand, a demand that Freud cannot bracket or do away with. Blanchot writes:

If it is true that for a certain Freud, "our unconscious cannot conceive of our own mortality" (is unable to represent mortality to itself), then it would seem to follow that dying is unrepresentable not only because it has no present, but also because it has no place, not even in time... (Disaster 118)

Freud's encounter with death seems, if anything, willful. As much as it

evades, he will set his traps for it, ensnare it with Eros, open a space in

hatred, aggression, or repetition for it to enter and be seen. Like Blanchot's

suicide, Freud goes out to meet death, subordinates death to the will, but is

caught in the duplicity, the double nature of death/dying. As Ann Smock writes:

But dying is not among the things which can be done; it is not one more, one final thing among the things that are possible. It is not the ultimate thing, but rather something like an ultimatum bearing upon the ultimate itself. It is the disaster ... Thus, the suicide-he who, scorning to flee death, sets forth resolutely to meet it-discovers, Blanchot says, another death, which is sheer flight and evasion, and not an undertaking that can be brought to a finish. (6-7)

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Death as a final possibility is what allows Freud to posit it as the zero state-a condition of zero energy that, through inertia, can draw life to it, the inorganic to which all life strives to return. But this is still the death that can be realized, and this zero state is the most positive and affirmative of all possibilities. Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge this in their talk of the

body without organs. This body, because it is a state of pure virtuality, can stand apart from existence without being plunged into the deathly uncer-

tainty of the Blanchotian disaster. There are, we know, two kinds of void: the creative void from which all possibilities spring, and the terrifying void that is never actualized, that pulls away from being but does not leave

being alone. Freud speaks of death, and in speaking of it, cannot help but

speak of that which functions as the former, a creative void. Destruction

always finds itself subordinated to creation, death to life. This is not to criticize Freud for presenting an incomplete, a duplicitous, or manipulative account of the death drive. It is rather to see Freud caught up in passion. As Steven Shaviro writes in Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory:

In the throes of passion no less than in those of dying (and dying, too, is a passion), I am not the same person I was. Indeed, I am not quite a "person," an individual or a subject, at all. (113)

As any subject caught up in passion, losing itself without the power to do so, Freud tries to speak; but what emerges is not the presence of death, or of anything, but a problematic silence. For all his speaking, Freud is still silent on death, but, as Andrew Bush writes, this "silence is not necessarily silent; rather it is troubled by an unending uninterrupted murmur..." (76). We may see in Freud the struggle, through speaking, to make death ap- pear, the impossible attempt, as in suicide, to make the "I" finally abandon itself and be invested by the power of abandonment. As Steven Shaviro observes:

Passion demands infinite self-abandonment, and I loyally abandon every- thing that is mine to it; but as long as I am strong enough to abandon everything to it, as long as "I" remain the one who does the abandoning, I remain too weak to abandon myself. (130)

Freud's inevitable error marks not a failure of his project but the very engagement of the project with an impossible question. The loss of self in the non-experience of dying, the impossibility of mastery and presence, the infinite passivity of passion and of dying-as-passion all keep Freud's

project from reaching a completion in which it can declare itself at an end. The desire to arrest death in order to exercise one's will over it is, of course,

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interpretable as another strategy of libido, the putting together of more

complex structures that encompass greater and greater regions of reality, but it may also be interpreted as a passion that draws on the infinity of

passivity. The inability to speak coupled with the impossibility of remain-

ing silent leads Freud's project into the paradoxical murmuring silence that characterizes the Blanchotian subject's encounter with passion, passion that renders it nonsubjective, steals its possibility of speaking and of

remaining silent. Some of the key concepts of Beyond the Pleasure Principle are marked by the duplicitous nature of dying: presence, mastery, repeti- tion, far from having any clear relationship to dying, are thrown into

paradox by the encounter.

Repetition and the Eternal Return

In the Fort-Da game that Freud elaborates in Beyond the Pleasure Prin-

ciple there is a clear relationship drawn between the act of repetition, the absence and hoped-for presence of the mother, and the aim of mastery. Freud's grandson, who has accomplished the "great cultural achievement" of instinctual renunciation, repeats a game (two games, actually, the first

consisting of throwing away objects and saying "gone" and the second of

throwing and retrieving a spool and saying "gone" and "there") in which Freud sees a problematic relationship with the pleasure principle. Freud asks why a child would repeat an experience in play-the disappearance of the mother-that could not have caused it any pleasure in reality. He

speculates that the child's desire may be to master the painful situation

through repetition, gaining a symbolic power over a process in which he is, in his everyday life, powerless.

We see in this story, first the value placed upon an illusory presence. To gain mastery, in Freud's interpretation of the Fort-Da game, is to render

present. And if presence is not possible, as in the earlier version of the

game, which involved only the throwing away of objects, presence will be

replaced by an illusory mastery that still functions as presence: presence of will, of power, of possibility. As with the relation to dying, the relation to

presence remains both attractive and unrealizable. Blanchot muses:

(to die): a far off legend, an ancient word that evoked nothing, if not the dreamy thought that there was an unknown modality of time. To arrive at presence, to die, two equally enchanted expressions. (Step/Not 18)

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Even the act of repetition is no guarantee of presence. It is in fact, as in the eternal return, exactly what holds presence and mastery at bay. Whether it is in the form that Deleuze elaborates-repetition as an independent power, still functioning as power, that overcomes the pleasure principle- or in the form of repetition as un-power, repetition works counter to any realization of mastery. The writer who writes about this repetition is not

thereby protected from it, cannot keep it at a safe, scientific or analytical distance. Writing is itself caught up in this repetition. "Accomplishment" is vain because it only takes place in a present rendered empty by the eternal return. Repetition is not the repetition of the present moment, but a move- ment that forever puts to the side the present moment or makes it the

placeless place between a past that can never be grasped and a future that never arrives. Blanchot writes:

[I]f I have lived it an infinite number of times, if I am called upon to relive it an infinite number of times, I am there at my table for eternity and to write it eternally: all is present in this unique instant that repeats itself, and there is nothing but this repetition of Being in its Same. But Nietzsche came very quickly to the thought that there was no one at his table, neither present in the Being of the Same. The affirmation of the Eternal Return had provoked either temporal ruin, leaving nothing else to think but dispersion as thought ... or, perhaps even more decisive, the ruin of the present alone, henceforth stricken with prohibition and, with it, the unitary root of the whole torn out. As if the repetition of the Return had no other function than to put in parentheses, in putting the present in parentheses, the number 1 or the word Being, compelling thereby an alteration that neither our language nor our logic can admit. (Step/Not 29-30)

Along with presence, the repetition annihilates any possibility of a selfhood or identity that grounds itself in this moment of presence, on "the continuities of past and future, of memory and anticipation" (Shaviro 147). Blanchot writes:

(Even in the law of the Eternal Return, the past could not repeat the future as the future would repeat the past. The repetition of the past as the future frees for a completely different modality-which one would call prophetic. In the past, what is given as repetition of the future does not give the future as repetition of the past. Dissymmetry is at work in repetition itself. (Step/Not 42)

Returning for a moment to Freud and the Fort-Da game, I am not claiming that this game is not as Freud says it is. Symbolization as an exercise of

power is not difficult to understand, especially in the case of a child whose

power is limited. There is little question that the ego, in trying to gain control of a situation, would employ a kind of repetition as rehearsal,

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repetition as drama, repetition as delusion or obsession that would allow it to confront painful situations. The patient in therapy who is struggling with a traumatic neurosis is the victim of a repetition that forces the ego to relive the repressed scene of its most traumatic crisis in order to somehow master it. "He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past" (Beyond 19). Although at the level of the ego we are operating by a definite set of laws-that repetition implies a drive for mastery, that remembering is the opposite of repression, that there is a way to stop the vain repetition of the traumatic moment-the

ego, the self, is precisely what is shattered by a repetition, a passion, a death that comes from the outside. Something happens. We do not know whence this something derives, where it goes, or even to whom it happens. This something, which Blanchot calls "the limit-experience" or "the dis- aster," does not touch the self: "1' am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside. It is in this way that I am threatened" (Disaster 1). He describes it

again in The Infinite Conversation:

The self has never been the subject of this experience. The "I" will never arrive at it, nor will the individual, this particle of dust that I am, nor even the self of us all that is supposed to represent absolute self-consciousness. Only the ignorance that the I-who-dies would incarnate by acceding to the space where in dying it never dies in the first person as an "I" will reach it ... We speak as though this were an experience, and yet we can never say we have undergone it. (209-210)

Freud, as therapist, must deal with this double nature of experience. The

ego will not be shored up against the limit experience. It is swept away. Swept away and left aside in the same movement, always and endlessly presiding over its own disappearance, its own death that it can never reach. In one of his most powerfully disturbing images, Blanchot presents us with the figure of the dying being whose need for bread has surpassed all

thought of survival:

In the camp, if... need sustains everything, maintaining an infinite relation to life even if it be in the most abject manner ... if need consecrates life through an egotism without ego-there is also the point at which need no longer helps one to live, but is an aggression against the entire person: a torment which denudes, an obsession of the whole being whereby the being is utterly destroyed. Dull, extinguished eyes burn suddenly with a savage gleam for a shred of bread, "even if one is perfectly aware that death is a few minutes away" and that there is no longer any point in nourishment. This gleam, this brilliance does not illuminate anything living ... In this ultimate moment when dying is exchanged for the life of bread, not, any longer, in order to satisfy a need and still less in order to make bread

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desirable, need-in need-also dies as simple need. And it exalts, it glorifies-by making it into something inhuman (withdrawn from all satis- faction)-the need of bread which has become an empty absolute where henceforth we can all only ever lose ourselves. (Disaster 83-84)

Fragmentary Writing: In the Non-Space between Death and Dying

What is Freud to do faced with such an overwhelming need, an ex-

perience that lies at the core of the most personal experience yet is utterly impersonal? We cannot so simply speak of remembering, reconstituting. We cannot, in fact, speak of doing anything. There is in the quotidian, the

everyday, the same absolute need that makes the eyes gleam savagely for the crust of bread. This need will be neither denied nor controlled nor even channelled. It cannot be remembered-and thereby mastered-because it is the forgetting that simultaneously makes possible our being in the world and pulls the ground out from under us. Blanchot writes:

When we perceive that we speak because we are able to forget, we perceive that this ability-to-forget does not belong solely to the realm of possibility. On the one hand forgetting is a capacity: we are able to forget and, thanks to this, able to live, to act, to work, and to remember-to be present: we are thus able to speak usefully. On the other hand, forgetting gets away, it escapes... At the same time as we make use of forgetting as a power, the capacity to forget turns us over to a forgetting without power, to the move- ment of that which slips and steals away: detour itself... Forgetting, death: the unconditional detour. (Infinite 195-196)

This is precisely, as we have seen, the double nature of death. It serves as interval, as space, as zero point-all functions in which it takes its place and indeed makes possible the world that exists-but it also plunges us into the most uncreative of voids. Like forgetfulness, it steals away, it gives us nothing to cling to or to speak of except its own impossibility. Freud's

project locates itself in a non-space between death and dying, the ground of

possibility and the impossible. Writing always in this placeless place Freud shares two essential

qualities with Blanchot, writing as fragment and the terror of life. Freud's

writing is, in the sense employed by Blanchot, fragmentary because it can

only begin when everything has been completed, when everything pos- sible has been said and there remains only the impossible.

The fragmentary: writing belongs to the fragmentary when all has been said. There would have to have been exhaustion of the word and by the word, accomplishment of all (of presence as all) as logos, in order that fragmentary writing could let itself be re-marked. (Step/Not 42).

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The correct criticism of the System does not consist... in finding fault with it, or in interpreting it insufficiently... but rather in rendering it invincible, invulnerable to criticism or, as they say, inevitable. Then, since nothing escapes it because of its omnipresent unity and the perfect cohesion of

everything, there remains no place for fragmentary writing unless it comes into focus as the impossible necessary: as that which is written in the time outside time, in the sheer suspense which without restraint breaks the seal of unity by, precisely, not breaking it, but by leaving it aside without this abandon's ever being able to be known. (Disaster 61)

Life as a Detour on the Way to Death

Freud has discovered this invulnerable totality. It is called libido, and, as we have seen, it stakes its claim over everything, even those movements

of negativity and loss that allow it to function. It is clearly not death that

Freud finds most disturbing, most deviant, most inexplicable, but life. For

Freud, it is life that is the unconditional detour.

The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception... It was still an easy matter at that time for a living substance to die; the course of its life was probably only a brief one... For a long time, perhaps, living substance was being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge even more widely from its original course of life and to make even more complicated detours before reaching its aim of death. (Beyond 46)

Blanchot, too, sees in life the terror of a movement that threatens to steal death from us.

[D]eath is man's possibility, his chance, it is through death that the future of a finished world is still there for us; death is man's greatest hope, his only hope of being man. This is why existence is his only real dread...existence frightens him, not because of death which could put an end to it, but because it excludes death, because it is still there underneath death, a presence in the depths of absence, an inexorable day in which all days rise and set. And there is no question that we are preoccupied by dying. But why? It is because when we die, we leave behind not only the world but also death... and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death but the impossibility of dying. (Orpheus 55)

It is not death that is relentless, but life. Life and dying are equally impos- sible, equally incomplete. If death offers an ending, a goal toward which

one might live, which then fills that life with meaning, dying is that which

precisely will not allow itself to be lived as an end. We see that any notion

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Blanchot and Freud 119

of presence is finally destroyed by dying, by the disaster, because presence itself takes on this unspeakable and terrifying otherness, hiding in the recesses of absence like a phantom. This life, the life that erupts into in- animate matter from the inconceivable outside, is no longer a safe haven from death. Life is not the unproblematic presence in which we flee ab-

sence, but is itself the force of the outside folding in to form being. For psychoanalysis, this inexorable life provides an insurmountable

difficulty. The very movement that sustains the ego, that can strengthen it

against the traumatic crises that threaten to overwhelm it, is the same movement that threatens it, that acts from a point outside of it and with a force that takes up the ego and renders it imaginary, like a child who

pretends to be driving the car in which it is only a passenger. Thinking, after the disaster, will no longer allow itself to be an instrument; it will not be directed to a goal; it will ensure nothing. Thinking will not channel,

analyze and direct the passions. Thinking itself becomes a passion.

To think endlessly, the way one dies-this is thinking that patience in its innocent perseverance seems to impose. And this endlessness implies not gratuity but responsibility. Whence the repeated, motionless step of the speechless unknown, there at our door, on the threshold.

To think the way one dies: without purpose, without power, without unity, and precisely, without "the way." (Disaster 39)

It would be a radically different psychoanalysis that would take this endless thought into it. Is analysis terminable? This question is asked, in

psychoanalysis, perhaps out of the belief that, if interminable, an analysis simply does not reach its goal. Blanchot, on the contrary, might ask whether there is a goal to be reached, and whether there is any connection between strategies for maintaining a unified ego, and those movements that are beyond the ego, that set it aside, render it empty, exactly by allowing it to think itself the full and present object of psychoanalysis.

Vanderbilt University

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